Readability

"Closed captioning and transcripts are among the tools that have been found to be very useful for alleviating difficulties with reading, spelling, writing, comprehension, and focus."

"Make your information accessible! Having information is important for people with intellectual disabilities. To learn new things. To take part in society. To know their rights and stand up for them. To decide and make their own choices. People with intellectual disabilities have the right to get information that is easy to read and understand."

"... we propose a Multi-Perspective Context Matching (MPCM) model, which is an end-to-end system that directly predicts the answer beginning and ending points in a passage ... Experimental result on the test set of SQuAD shows that our model achieves a competitive result on the leaderboard."

"The Blind Arduino Project grew out of a community effort led by Dr. Miele in late 2015 to better understand barriers faced by blind people wanting to participate in the vibrant global culture of DIY hardware prototyping. Arduino is an inexpensive, open-source electronics platform used by everyone from young hobbyists to high-tech developers to build computerized devices integrating sensors, motors, displays, wireless communications, and a host of other tools."

"Call upon the aid of artificial intelligence and meet Iris.AI. It’s a tool that gives you a shortcut to all the science that’s out there on the web. It acts as a science assistant and makes sense of any openly available scientific paper you come across."

"Teaching machines to read natural language documents remains an elusive challenge. Machine reading systems can be tested on their ability to answer questions posed on the contents of documents that they have seen, but until now large scale training and test datasets have been missing for this type of evaluation. In this work we define a new methodology that resolves this bottleneck and provides large scale supervised reading comprehension data. This allows us to develop a class of […]

"The best way for AI machines to learn is by feeding them huge data sets of annotated examples, and the Daily Mail has unwittingly created one."

"Some people with cognitive disabilities have difficulty with aspects of reading other than seeing and decoding text. The aim of this note is to bring to the Symposium a number of opportunities for research that may lead to ways to adapt textual content so as to make it easier to read for these people."

"Social media has become an important tool for social networking. However, most social networking services are very challenging for people with learning disabilities or cognitive impairments. The problems are mostly related to understanding the different concepts of the environment and related terminology, but the accessibility and usability problems common to all internet services also apply.

"This position paper discusses the feasibility and a possible structure to include "Plain Language" or "Easy to Read" into the process and workflow of Web-engineering regarding the inherent (or micro-) workflow of authoring in "Plain Language" or "Easy to Read", and the (meta-) workflow of authoring and designing for the web in general. Following studies of Web-Engineering workflows and experiences out of day by day practice, legibility and […]

"The usage of electronic information and communication services is of great relevance in different parts of people's daily life, including private and work activities. People who are not able to use modern information technology - e.g. due to a disability - are therefore threatened to be excluded from modern information society. Especially people with intellectual disabilities regularly face problems preventing them from accessing information. These problems include hard or unfamiliar […]

"Many public and governmental services, regulations and information aim at people who are unemployed, have low education levels, have disabilities or are elderly. The same groups have low levels of digital skills compared to the population at large and experience problems in comprehending the digital content and applying it in realistic tasks. According to studies of adult literacy, about 10% of the Dutch population has a literacy level that is insufficient to use written information to […]

:"One of the factors that can decrease readability is the presence of specialized language and advanced terminology. Such terminology can influence the understanding and the ease of read for lay persons. Several research studies have identified that many of the existing web sites within specialized domain use language with advanced terminology that is often inappropriate for their target audience. Examples of domains where this can happen are medicine, technology, low, finance and others. […]

"Reading and understanding texts containing long sentences, unusual words, and complex linguistic structures can be very hard for persons with cognitive or learning disabilities. Knowing the readability level of a document, users have the opportunity to choose the most suitable text, from a collection of documents delivering the same information. Considering that the availability of texts annotated with the proper level of readability is strictly relied to the availability of software […]

"Traditional readability indices and formulas have mainly rested on shallow features such as word and sentence length, while deeper linguistic features contributing to text understandability have been ignored. Furthermore, the needs of specific groups of readers have generally been overlooked, and easy-to-read texts have predominantly been produced in order to fit a broad audience including second-language-learners, dyslectics, beginning readers and persons with cognitive disabilities. We […]

"User-generated content (UGC) has transformed the way that information is handled on-line. In this paradigm shift, users create, share and consume textual information that is likely to present informal features such as poor formatting, misspellings, phonetic transliterations, slang or lexical variants (Ritter et. al., 2010). These texts found in social networks, chats or blogs, usually offer poor accessibility for people with cognitive disabilities or people not familiar with these […]

"When using digital pictograph communication environments, such as the WAI-NOT environment (www.wai-not.org), which aims at users with cognitive disabilities, users can give input in two forms. They can select pictographs from a two-level category system or they can use text, which is then converted into pictographs. In the conversion from text to pictographs, we see that only straightforward string matching procedures are currently applied, resulting in two types of problems. The first […]

"Despite of many efforts, there is still no overall acceptance on the universal linguistic principles of easy-to-read (ETR). The principles vary from detailed and strict standards (e.g. Inclusion Europe 2009) to holistic and loose guidelines (e.g. IFLA 2010) which all try to guide the writers and authors to create simplified texts for non-fluent readers. This discrepancy seems to be connected to two main factors: to the definition of the persons needing ETR and to the definition of text […]

"The guidelines for Easy-to-Read -material are originally intended for printed media. So quite understandably these rules mainly contain guidelines that concern how to E2R-content and how to present it. But Internet is a different kind of media. In addition to content, also the user interface and the structure of the site should be designed to be accessible when easy-to-read language is used in network services.One important issue when E2R-material is published in Internet is the fact that […]

"The technical aspects of Web content accessibility are discussed since many years and are addressed by international guidelines and legal regulations in many countries. The importance of understandable content and accessible information for persons with learning difficulties has only recently begun to receive increased attention. The rules and guidelines for understandable Web content are more heterogeneous. Often they were defined as ad-hoc rules and lack scientific evidence. This paper […]

"This study addresses the automatic simplification of texts in Spanish in order to make them more accessible to people with cognitive disabilities. A corpus analysis of original and manually simplified news articles was undertaken in order to identify and quantify relevant operations to be implemented in a text simplification system. The articles were further compared at sentence and text level by means of automatic feature extraction and various machine learning classification algorithms, […]

"In this paper we investigate the task of text simplification for Brazilian Portuguese. Our purpose is three-fold: to introduce a simplification tool for such language and its underlying development methodology, to present an on-line authoring system of simplified text based on the previous tool, and finally to discuss the potentialities of such technology for education. The resources and tools we present are new for Portuguese and innovative in many aspects with respect to previous […]

"In this article, we present results from the Simplext project, which is dedicated to automatic text simplification for Spanish. We present a modular system with dedicated procedures for syntactic and lexical simplification that are grounded on the analysis of a corpus manually simplified for people with special needs. We carried out an automatic evaluation of the system’s output, taking into account the interaction between three different modules dedicated to different simplification […]

"The symposium aimed to explore the user needs and state of the art in research, development, and practice to contribute to a common understanding of easy-to-read on the Web. It is intended to encourage the development of better guidance, support, and tools for developers, designers, and users, and to inform researchers, standards developers, and policy makers on how to better address easy-to-read on the Web. In particular, it is intended to analyze how to better connect, elaborate, and […]

"This is an attempt to compile and categorize contemporary and past research on text simplification."

"We propose an approach to simplifying lexical content, based on an empirical analysis of a parallel corpus of original and manually simplified texts in Spanish. We focus on the treatment of reporting verbs (RepV) – verbs that introduce both direct and indirect speech when reporting a speaker's language as a specific type of lexical units that have rather consistently received the same treatment by human editors. The present work is part of the Simplext project aimed at developing an […]

"In this study we present an estimation of texts containing English dyslexic errors in the Web. A classification of lexical errors is proposed and unique dyslexic errors are distinguished from other kind of errors due to spelling and grammatical errors, typos, OCR errors and errors produced when English is used as a foreign language. A representative sample of each kind of error is used to calculate a lower bound for the prevalence of dyslexia in the English Web. Although dyslexia has been […]

"In this study we present an analysis of the lexical quality of social media in the Web, focusing on the Web 2.0, social networks, blogs and micro-blogs, multimedia and opinions. We find that blogs and social networks are the main players and also the main contributors to the bad lexical quality of the Web. We also compare our results with the rest of the Web finding that in general social media has worse lexical quality than the average Web and that their quality is one order of magnitude […]

"The goal of this research is to make textual content in the Web --especially in Spanish and English-- more accessible to people with dyslexia. The techniques that we will use to make the Web more accessible are Natural Language Processing (NLP) for its content (text) and Web design guidelines for its layout. To find out which solutions tackle better our purpose we will test a diverse set of Web pages examples. The main methodology to evaluate these examples will be eye tracking using […]

"In this paper we propose a measure for estimating the lexical quality of the Web, that is, the representational aspect of the textual web content. Our lexical quality measure is based in a small corpus of spelling errors and we apply it to English and Spanish. We first compute the correlation of our measure with web popularity measures to show that gives independent information and then we apply it to different web segments, including social media. Our results shed a light on the lexical […]

"This study explores the relation between text readability and the visual conceptual schemes which aim to make the text more clear for these specific target readers. Our results are based on a user study for Spanish native speakers through a group of twenty three dyslexic users and a control group of similar size. The data collected from our study combines qualitative data from questionnaires and quantitative data from tests carried out using eye tracking. The findings suggest that […]

"We show that a recently introduced lexical quality measure is also valid to measure textual Web accessibility. Our measure estimates the lexical quality of a site based in the occurrence in English Web pages of a set of more than 1,345 words with errors. We then compute the correlation of our measure with Web popularity measures to show that gives independent information. This together with our previous results implies that this measure maps to some of the WCAG principles of […]

"In this paper we present an ebook reader for Android, which displays ebooks in a more accessible way according to user needs. Since people with dyslexia represent a substantial group with a reading disability, we designed a set of specific guidelines which are included in the tool. These layout guidelines for people with dyslexia are based on a user study with a group of twenty two users with dyslexia. The data collected from our study combines quantitative data from tests carried out […]

"In this work we present an attempt to analyze vowel substitutions found in a corpus of Spanish texts written by children with dyslexia, taking into account the phonetic nature of the errors. First, we present a brief characterization of dyslexia (Section 2 ), followed by a discussion of the relevance of errors produced by persons with dyslexia (Section 3). In Section 4, the corpus of Spanish texts written by children with dyslexia is described, and in Section 5 we put forward a typology […]

"This paper presents a user study which compares reading performance versus user preference in customization of the text. We study the following parameters: grey scales for the font and the background, colors combinations, font size, column width and spacing of characters, lines and paragraphs. We used eye tracking to measure the reading performance of 92 participants, and questionnaires to collect their preferences. The study shows correlations on larger contrast and sizes, but there is […]

"We present an ebook reader for Android which displays ebooks in a more accessible manner for users with dyslexia. The ebook reader combines features that other related tools already have, such as text-to-speech technology, and new features, such as displaying the text with an adapted text layout based on the results of a user study with participants with dyslexia. Since there is no universal profile of a user with dyslexia, the layout settings are customizable and users can override the […]

"In this study we present a lower bound of the prevalence of dyslexia in the Web for English and Spanish. On the basis of analysis of corpora written by dyslexic people, we propose a classification of the different kinds of dyslexic errors. A representative data set of dyslexic words is used to calculate this lower bound in web pages containing English and Spanish dyslexic errors. We also present an analysis of dyslexic errors in major Internet domains, social media sites, and throughout […]

"In this study we analyze how an specific aspect of text customization, text and background colors, can improve readability of people with dyslexia. Our user study compares two kinds of data, quantitative (user performance) and qualitative (user preferences), taking into consideration previous recommendations and the color luminosity ratio prescribed by the WCAG 2.0. (W3C, 2008)."

"In this paper we study the effect of different lexical resources and strategies for selecting synonyms in a lexical simplification system for the Spanish language. The resources used for the experiments are the Spanish EuroWordNet, the Spanish Open Thesaurus and a combination of both. As for the synonym selection strategies, we have used both local and global contexts for word sense disambiguation. We present a novel evaluation framework in lexical simplification that takes into account […]

" In this paper we analyze the textual parameters that impact dyslexic reading and compare them with the features of the current reading tools, specialized or not. Our main conclusion is that people with dyslexia are an example to support universal accessibility: the inclusion of their needs match the usability requirements of all other readers. Most of the dyslexic needs are covered through the customization of the text in existing generic reading tools, but to cover all the requirements, […]

"Are numbers expressed as digits easier to read and understand than written with letters? What about fractions and percentages? Exact or rounded values? We present an eye-tracking study that attempts to answer these questions for Spanish, using fixation and reading time to measure readability as well as comprehension questions to score understandability. We find that digits are faster to read but do not help comprehension. Fractions help understandability while percentages help […]

"In an experiment with 46 people, 23 with dyslexia and 23 as a control group, we compare texts where words were substituted by shorter/longer and more/less frequent synonyms. Using more frequent words caused the participants with dyslexia to read significantly faster, while the use of shorter words caused them to understand the text better. Amongst the control group, no significant effects were found. These results provide evidence that people with dyslexia may benefit from interactive […]

"This paper presents a method to design reinforcement word exercises to support children with dyslexia. The method takes into account linguistic patterns found in the errors written by people with dyslexia and their specific language difficulties. The method has six stages: definition of the exercise type, word selection, word modification, selection of the distractors, creation of the difficulty levels, and selection of the text layout. More than 5,000 word exercises in Spanish and […]

"We present DysWebxia, an eBook reader for iOS which modifies the form and the content of the text. This tool is specifi­ cally designed for people with dyslexia according to previous research with this target group. The settings are customizable depending on the reading preferences."

"In this paper, we present the first experiment that uses eye-tracking to measure the effect of font type on reading speed. Using a within-subject design, 48 subjects with dyslexia read 12 texts with 12 different fonts. Sans serif, monospaced and roman font styles significantly improved the reading performance over serif, proportional and italic fonts. On the basis of our results, we present a set of more accessible fonts for people with dyslexia."

"In this paper we present the evaluation of DysWebxia, a reading app for iOS devices, specially designed for people with dyslexia. DysWebxia integrates previous results about the best way to present text for people with dyslexia together with a unique feature, the ability to show synonyms on demand for complex words...Our results show that the quality of the synonyms generated by the new algorithm outperforms a frequency based baseline, and that the participants found DysWebxia very […]

"The use of certain font types and sizes improve the reading performance of people with dyslexia. However, the impact of combining such features with the semantics of the text has not yet been studied. In this eye-tracking study with 62 people (31 with dyslexia), we explore whether highlighting the main ideas of the text in boldface has an impact on readability and comprehensibility. We found that highlighting keywords improved the comprehension of participants with dyslexia. To […]

"We introduce a language resource for Spanish, DysList, composed of a list of unique errors extracted from a collection of texts written by people with dyslexia. Each of the errors was annotated with a set of characteristics as well as visual and phonetic features. To the best of our knowledge this is the largest resource of this kind, especially given the difficulty of finding texts written by people with dyslexia."

"Worldwide, 10% of the population has dyslexia, a cognitive disability that reduces readability and comprehension of written information. The goal of this thesis is to make text more accessible for people with dyslexia by combining human computer interaction validation methods and natural language processing techniques. In the initial phase of this study we examined how people with dyslexia identify errors in written text. Their written errors were analyzed and used to estimate the […]

"This paper focuses on the evaluation of English text simplification using the crowd. We show that leveraging crowds can result in a collective decision that is accurate and converges to a consensus rating. Our results from 2,500 crowd annotations show that the crowd can effectively rate levels of simplicity. This may allow simplification systems and system builders to get better feedback about how well content is being simplified, as compared to standard measures which classify […]

"Reading text on the Web is a challenging task for many people, such as those with cognitive impairments, reading diffi­ culties or people who are learning a new language. In this paper we present a web browser plug-in to help with reading Spanish text on the Web. The plug-in is freely available for Chrome and presents definitions and simpler synonyms on demand for the selected web text. The tool was modi­ fied following the suggestions of 5 people (2 with diagnosed dyslexia) who […]

"This paper reviews the main challenges of studying dyslexia for web accessibility. These are: (1) measuring the impact of dyslexia in the population; (2) the limitations of the up-todate studies; and (3) including dyslexia in the Web accessibility guidelines. While some aspects are already addressed by the guidelines, we propose the inclusion of simple recommendations for typeface and font size that would benefit both people with and without dyslexia. We also suggest a change in the […]

"Worldwide, around 10% of the population has dyslexia, a specific learning disorder. Most of previous eye tracking experiments with people with and without dyslexia have found differences between populations suggesting that eye movements reflect the difficulties of individuals with dyslexia. In this paper, we present the first statistical model to predict readers with and without dyslexia using eye tracking measures. The model is trained and evaluated in a 10-fold cross experiment with a […]

"We present a new context-aware method for lexical simplification that uses two free language resources and real web frequencies. We compare it with the state-of-the-art method for lexical simplification in Spanish and the established simplification baseline, that is, the most frequent synonym. Our method improves upon the other methods in the detection of complex words, in meaning preservation, and in simplicity. Although we use Spanish, the method can be extended to other languages since […]

"In this work-in-progress we present a computer-based method to design German reinforcement exercises for children with dyslexia. From different schools, we collected more than 1,000 errors written by children with dyslexia. Then, we created a classification of dyslexic errors in German and annotated the errors with different language specific features, such as phonetic and visual features. For the creation of the exercises we took into account the linguistic knowledge extracted from the […]

"This paper presents a set of recommendations to customize texts on a computer screen in a more accessible way for this target group. This set is based in an eye tracking study with 92 people, 46 with dyslexia and 46 as control group, where the reading performance of the participants was measured. The following parameters were studied: color combinations for the font and the screen background, font size, column width as well as character, line and paragraph spacing. It was found that […]

"Playing error-based exercises presented in a computer game was found to significantly improve the spelling skills of children with dyslexia in Spanish. Since there are no similar error-based exercises for German, we adapted the method to German and created 2,500 new word exercises. Since dyslexia manifestations are language dependent, the replication of the method required (i) collecting new texts written by German children with dyslexia; (ii) the annotation and the linguistic analysis of […]

"Detecting dyslexia is crucial so that people who have dyslexia can receive training to avoid associated high rates of academic failure. In this paper we present Dytective, a game designed to detect dyslexia. The results of a within-subjects experiment with 40 children (20 with dyslexia) show significant differences between groups who played Dytective. These differences suggest that Dytective could be used to help identify those likely to have dyslexia."

"Poor spelling is a challenge faced by people with dyslexia throughout their lives. Spellcheckers are therefore a crucial tool for people with dyslexia, but current spellcheckers do not detect real-word errors, which are a common type of errors made by people with dyslexia. Real-word errors are spelling mistakes that result in an unintended but real word, for instance, form instead of from. In this paper, we introduce a system called Real Check that uses a probabilistic language model, a […]

"We report from an eye-tracking experiment with 104 participants who performed reading tasks on the most popular text-heavy website of the Web: Wikipedia. Our findings provide evidence that readability, measured via mean fixation duration, increased significantly with font size. Further, comprehension questions had significantly more correct responses for font sizes 18 and 26. For line spacing, we found marginal e↵ects, suggesting that the two tested extremes (0.8 and 1.8) impair […]

"We ran a study to evaluate the readability of captions generated by a new crowd captioning approach versus professional captionists and automatic speech recognition (ASR). In this approach, captions are typed by classmates into a system that aligns and merges the multiple incomplete caption streams into a single, comprehensive real-time transcript. Our study asked 48 deaf and hearing readers to evaluate transcripts produced by a professional captionist, ASR and crowd captioning software […]

In this paper, we compare alternative techniques for evaluating a software system for simplifying the readability of texts for adults with mild intellectual disabilities (ID). Using a Wizard-of-Oz prototype, we conducted experiments with a group of adults with ID to test alternative formats of questions to measure comprehension of the information in the news articles. We have found that some forms of questions work well at measuring the difficulty level of a text: multiple-choice questions with […]

Operationalized plain language guidelines, with literature citations for each, starting on page 109.

Defines plain language, low literacy, health literacy, writing plainly

Students with and without mental retardation (ns = 45 and 60, respectively) were compared on nine measures of syntactic complexity in writing at three grade levels. A multivariate analysis of variance revealed significant differences for group, but not for grade level or group by grade level. Students without mental retardation scored significantly better than those with mental retardation on all components of syntactic complexity except clause length. These results support other research in […]

Two versions of a simplified manifesto were produced: one text-based and the other symbol-based (with text). Participants were randomly assigned to two groups: one received the text-based information, and the other the symbol-based information (with text). Participants were asked a series of questions about the material, both immediately (time 1) and a short time afterwards (time 2), to assess understanding (the material was in front of them throughout). Both versions produced relatively low […]

"Accessibility is about the ability to reach and navigate a place; the opportunity to participate, use, and enjoy a service or facility; and the right to receive information. However, the barriers to accessibility faced by people with intellectual disabilities are not always apparent and, therefore, require exploration and clarification. The main accessibility challenges faced by people with intellectual disability can be categorized by four domains: pace, complexity, literacy, and […]

"I review history, starting with Turing’s seminal paper, reaching back ultimately to when our species started to outperform other primates, searching for the questions that will help us develop a computational account of human intelligence.. I illustrate how these answers can influence a research program, describing the Genesis system, a system that works with short summaries of stories, together with low-level common-sense rules and higher-level concept patterns...I conclude by […]

"To a very large extent, children learn in and out of school from written text. Information Communications Technologies (ICT) offers many possibilities to facilitate learning by confronting children with multimodal texts. In order to be able to implement learning environments that optimally facilitate children's learning, insight is needed into the cognitive processes underlying text comprehension. In this light, the aim of this special issue is to report on new advances in text […]

"The author examines the empirical, methodological, theoretical, and practical contributions of the six studies in this special issue on eye tracking as a tool to study and enhance multimedia learning. The design of learning environments involving graphics should be consistent with a research-based theory of how people learn and evidence-based principles of how to help people learn. Research using eye tracking offers a unique path to testing aspects of theories of multimedia learning, […]